“Age measures life in years, but it’s the life in those years that contributes most..”
“There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul, then the way it treats its children.”
“Where … do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home—so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Such are the places where every man, woman, and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere.”
“I believe that education is all about being excited about something. Seeing passion and enthusiasm helps push an educational message.”
“The women of today are the thoughts of their mothers and grandmothers, embodied, and made alive. They are active, capable, determined and bound to win. They have one thousand generations back of them … Millions of women, dead and gone are speaking through us today.”
“To love. To be loved.
To never forget your own insignificance.
To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you.
To seek joy in the saddest places.
To pursue beauty to its lair.
To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple.
To respect strength, never power.
Above all, to watch.
To try and understand.
To never look away.
And never, never to forget.”
“The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we had when we created them.”
“We must restore hope to young people, help the old, be open to the future, spread love.
Be poor among the poor.
We need to include the excluded and preach peace.”
“ANDREW DENTON: We’ve seen the recent Senate report into the CIA intelligence failures in Iraq. What do you make of Michael Moore’s argument that President Bush is fraudulently elected and is pursuing a war for fraudulent reasons?
BILL CLINTON: Well, I… Those are two different things. I strongly, strongly disagree with the Supreme Court decision in the Bush v. Gore case in 2000. I think it is one of the very worst decisions the Supreme Court ever made and I explain in my book, in terms I hope a layman can understand, why I think it was a gross abuse of power. In effect, the Supreme Court robbed tens of thousands of their fellow citizens of their right to vote. So, I think that was wrong.
So, on the war, I have a slightly different view from Michael Moore but certainly a different view from the Bush Administration. Uh, the CIA is now being blamed for all this bad intelligence in America. They miss some things, you know. Apparently, they should have known that there was less likelihood of chemical and biological weapons in Iraq. OK, let’s posit that. I don’t think they cooked that up for President Bush ‘cause that’s what I was told for eight years too. But the CIA did not say there was a connection between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. They didn’t say that. The Administration did but they didn’t. So, my view is that the President and Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld and Mr Wolfowitz, they wanted to go to war in Iraq to replace Saddam because they thought the whole enterprise had merit in and of itself – to shake up the authoritarian Arab regimes in the Middle East, to make Israel feel more secure and give America more leverage in making peace with Palestinians and Israelis. And I think that, in the beginning, this whole weapons of mass destruction thing, for them, was maybe a good way to get their foot in the door but not the major issue for them.”
“All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”